GREENSBORO, N.C.—Here’s what happened on the play that could derail the championship chances for one of the most talented teams in the country, from the perspective of a puffy-eyed Kendall Marshall.

“I was on a fast break,” Marshall said Sunday night while sitting in the North Carolina locker room with a massive ice pack wrapped around his right hand. “I drove down the middle and went up for a righthand layup and got pushed to the ground, and it happened when I fell. I hit my funny bone first and that’s what I was most worried about, but that’s fine.”

Marshall, one of the elite point guards in the country, jumped to his feet quickly after he was bumped to the ground by Creighton’s Ethan Wragge with 10:56 left in the second half. But Marshall knew something was wrong.

“I did,” he said. “I felt the pain, but I didn’t want to make a big deal of it because we still had a basketball game to win.”

On a team with three future NBA lottery picks, Marshall has developed into the undisputed team leader. He’s the one who makes the offense run, the engine that drives a team with an almost unfair amount of talent.

And now he has a broken bone in his right wrist.

Marshall stayed in the game and actually had a couple more assists before subbing out for good with 1:54 left on the clock and the victory secure.

“When we came out of the timeout, I asked the ref for the ball because I just wanted to dribble it a few times and shoot a shot,” Marshall said. “He kind of got mad at me, told me I couldn’t see the ball anymore.”

Needless to say, Marshall's future in the '12 NCAA Tournament is in doubt. He reportedly will have surgery Monday, four days before the Tar Heels play Ohio in the Midwest Region semifinals in St. Louis.

The only reason it’s not officially done is that Marshall is lefthanded, and the injury — a fracture of the scaphoid bone — is in his right wrist.

“That’s the most positive thing. If it was my left hand, I’d be telling you all right now I’m not playing next week,” Marshall said. “But being that I was still able to be out there and help my team out and get them in positions to where they were able to hit shots, that’s encouraging. This isn’t a one-on-one sport. It’s a team sport.”

And he’s not just lefthanded. He’s lefthanded, if you catch the drift.

“I don’t dribble with my right hand as it is,” Marshall joked after the game.

This is yet another horrible break for the Tar Heels.

Since July, they’ve lost Leslie McDonald and Dexter Strickland — two talented shooting guards — to season-ending injuries, and big man John Henson just came back against Creighton after missing three games with an injured wrist.

With a healthy Marshall, the Tar Heels were one of the overwhelming favorites to reach New Orleans and cut down the nets in the championship game. Without him? That’s probably not going to happen — coach Roy Williams said after the game that Stillman White and Justin Watts would handle the point guard duties. But what about with an extremely limited Marshall at the helm for as many minutes as he’s able to offer? Just having that opportunity is North Carolina’s best-case scenario at this point.

“When you go to the Sweet 16, it’s supposed to be a lot more fun than this,” Williams said.